Sophianotloren

zerostatereflex:

Crow solves an 8 step process.
Crows are amazing, I’ve been photographing them here in Seattle for a couple of years. They have distinct personalities and remember our faces. They actually started flying in and waiting for me when I would get home in hopes of a free unsalted peanut. I think of them as friends.

I had no idea they could do THIS.

An 8 step problem solving process. They’ve trained on each separate task, though not all together. This was the first time.

(Crows will survive the zombies and restart society, no doubt.)

The Congressional Budget Office re-evaluation of the PPACA (Obamacare) has revealed to a larger audience something I've known for a while.

"And I think that raising the retirement age... and eventually getting the retirement age to 70 is a step that needs to be taken." - Speaker John Boehner in 2010.

No, you're not supposed to retire when you're 55. You sound to me like you are totally capable of still working. People are retiring now at 50 and 55 and so forth when they are still capable of working. According to the tables at 55, you've got 22 years left... - Rush Limpbaugh, (Crooks and Liars)

Anything which allows Americans the ability to not work is hateful to Republicans because they represent Corporations and the very Rich. Republicans and their Owners see the American worker as nothing more than an expensive cog in the gears of Industry or War.

This is why no Conservative or Republican Alternative to Obamacare has every been offered. The Republican Healthcare alternative remains Don't Get Sick and if you do, Die Quickly.

Republicans don't want retired people around. They want you to work hard throughout your productive years after which they'll discard you when you get injured, sick or old.

Republicans want to Work you to Death.

Update:
Amanda Marcotte the Pandagon highlights how conservative Ross Douthat has tried to massage the Republican CBO lie by claiming that working yourself to death is for your own good, "people we should want to be attached to the workforce, for their own long-term good and the good of the economy as well.” He didn’t tell us who that was, but we suspect if someone told Douthat himself to shovel coal 50 hours a week for his own long-term good and the good of the economy, he would swiftly preclude himself.

There’s so much wrong with this:

The problems with the ICBM force, military and outside experts say, stem from the Cold War’s end and the pressures of the nation’s post-9/11 conflicts. Those twin challenges have dulled the glory and pride once associated with the nuclear mission. “Many current senior Air Force leaders interviewed were cynical about the nuclear mission, its future, and its true (versus publicly stated) priority to the Air Force,” a 2012 Air Force report said.

The pressure to cheat can be intense: Some tests were scored to two decimal places—99.44%, for example, like the purported purity of Ivory Soap. “The cheating is pervasive,” says a former Minuteman crew operator who left the service in 2010. “It’s pervasive because the leadership places so much emphasis on rote test scores to advance.” In the wake of the recent scandal at Malmstrom, airmen retook tests under intense scrutiny to ensure there was no cheating; the average test score was 95.5%. “So they’re not cheating to pass —they’re cheating to get 100s because so much emphasis is placed on test scores to advance,” this former missileer says…

Cheating was encouraged by higher-ups. “The commander would sit down with you and say, `These tests are ridiculous—you can try to do it all by yourself, which is noble, but you’ll but you’ll never be promoted,’” says the missiler who left the service in 2011. “There was times I was saved from failing by cheating. The testing got so ridiculous that it was no longer testing your ability to be a missile operator—it was testing your ability to take tests.”

The higher-ranking squadron and group commanders played along. “Some of the colonels were so lazy they’d call and tell me to fill in the answers for them,” the ex-missileer said of their quarterly recertification tests. “I very rarely saw the colonels take the test honestly.”

As I’ve argued, the problem isn’t the indiscipline of a particular subset of Air Force officers.  That indiscipline in the nearly inevitable result of institutional indifference to maintaining a capability that yields little in the way of resources or prestige.

 

 

Not very Valentine’s Day of me*, you say?  Well, there it is.  Death is no respecter of calendars, holidays, or fond human hopes.  Perhaps this is why death and/or the fear of it is at the crux of existential crisis?

And for me, it is the heart of my pagan practice.  Now, that said, I want to hit “post” and run away.  I don’t really want to discuss it further because this is where anyone says “Wow, she is NUTS!”

But hey, that ship has sailed, right?  Even on my political blog, I announced that I built a Labyrinth for the dead of the two latest wars the US began after Sept 11, 2001.  And when I began building it?  Yes, a bit like “Wart” in T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King” – or “Sword in the Stone” or “Camelot” — for a brief (but not so shining) moment, I thought it was just a “war memorial.”  Ok, I hoped that’s all it was.

But, even as I worked in the heat of August 2003, I knew better.  I told myself it was heat affecting my brain, but when out there and the air was alive with whispers…I finally could not argue with the fact that something strange was operative.  My mind would fill with images, like pages of a yearbook —face after face of young men.  And my dreams were wild: I’d be high over a dusty landscape in a helicopter, hunched over a weapon.  I’d be throwing bottles of water from the back of a truck to a crowd of following children.  I’d be mopping blood out of a vehicle.  I’d be clenching my agonized, bleeding leg — only my leg was not there.

At last, I stopped arguing with myself and said, “What if the Dead are showing me their lives and their deaths?”  The pressure eased.  My strength compounded working with huge hunks of sandstone all alone.  I’d burst into tears drinking water, knowing I’d had more to drink on a temperate Northwest afternoon in September than a man fighting in Iraq in 120 degree heat.  And at last, it was done and late in October the monument was delivered and put in place.  And a fire welcomed guests, luminarias with names on them lit the Walk, a bugler played taps and I donned my 30 year old military uniform to read a list of 408names of those killed in Iraq; I had not yet collected the names from Afghanistan.

I walked the sandstone labyrinth to it’s heart, stabbed my hand with a knife three different people had sharpened…and my hand did not bleed.  I squeezed a couple wretched drops onto the central stone in pledge…but precisely in pledge of what I was a bit unsure.  Once off the walk, my hand dripped and ran blood plentifully and I knew, enough blood had flowed — no more blood would be shed upon those stones.  And people came to me in tears; they saw legions from past ages they said.  They felt people “who were not there” on the Walk, they saw faces of people in their families who had died at war.  I was quite shaken.

So, I am a priestess not of life, but of Death.  I serve the dead that most of a nation never notices.  I am at peace with Death as something that comes for all, if not always at peace with how, when, and at whose human behest!  I don’t fear discussing death and I have no platitudes to offer about it; it remains an ineffable thing forever on the horizon until the event is upon the one doing the dying.

And even before building the Walk, I was the one people who barely knew me called — when someone suicided and they needed to hear something besides “I am sorry.”  When someone died after a long illness and they weren’t ready in spite of all warning.  They called me when what they wanted was the answer to “Why?” and it always seemed my intuitive reply was what they needed to hear.  It was a strange role to find myself cast in, I, one who hoped death meant nothingness at last.  Because I am weary, always was weary and neither needed nor desired any “heaven.”

Some would say, what service can be offered to the dead, if death ends all.  Truly, I don’t know what death ends aside from habitation of a body.  I’ve looked up from gardening work upon the Walk to see a fatigue-clad figure at my gate  – one that raises a hand in greeting and vanishes.  And later, there is a DOD death notice, and eventually a photo on the CNN site –and yes, sometimes, it is the face that stood at my gate.  Something survives, even if I can’t say for how long or why.  All I can have are theories I cannot prove, all I can do is act on intuition.

I walk the stones, but no long romantic black veil is necessary.  A list of names.  A will to hold back tears, to make a welcoming sound with my voice.  Sympathy for the living who are left in pain, even as the dead step free of suffering — at least on the physical level. It would be nice to know what comes at the alleged ‘end of all’ — but we don’t know.  Religion is built on guesses.  I don’t guess.  I work with what I see and feel; I keep myself honest in my lack of complete knowledge and act with compassion and love. I could be wrong, of course.  I could also be at least partially correct.  In some ways, I don’t really think it matters which — for I am here and now, and must do the best I have right now, right here.  ”D” is for Death….and Duty.

*I’m not really into Valentine’s Day — maybe I broke all my romantic bones?

Tagged: death, duty, pagan blogging project, pagan life, priesthood, war

Better keep the underclass from reproducing. Will destroy the race or something.

A prison doctor investigated by the California medical board after ordering tubal ligations without state approval is responsible for hundreds of other inmate sterilizations, The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

Dr. James Heinrich also has a history of medical controversies and malpractice settlements both inside and outside prison walls. Female patients have accused him of trying to dictate their reproductive decisions, unsanitary habits and medical malpractice.

Despite that history, Heinrich was not only hired by the prison system, but also kept on once a federal judge appointed a receiver to clean up the prison’s medical system.

Heinrich, 69, retired from Valley State Prison for Women in 2011 after six years. Federal authorities rehired Heinrich as a contract physician, and he continued treating inmates at Valley State though December 2012.

An earlier CIR investigation, published in July, found that more than 100 tubal ligation surgeries took place without the required state approval from 2006 to 2010. At the time, prison documents indicated there were 148 of those surgeries. Analysis of subsequent data and documentation provided under the state Public Records Act shows there were 132 because some were double counted.

The women were signed up for the surgery while pregnant at the two women’s prisons that house pregnant inmates, the California Institution for Women in Corona and Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla. Valley State became a men’s prison in 2013.

Why, it’s almost like this nation still oppresses women, people of color, and the poor.

I know, not nice.  I never said I was nice, did I?I am not feeling the “love”, ok?  My Valentine’s Day dusk will be spent walking the Labyrinth with new names of men killed in Afghanistan this week.  So, imagine, if I feel pissed off and sad…how this Valentine’s Day feels for the families and sweethearts of the men who will never send another Valentine greeting?

Two of the names (John Pelham and Roberto Skelt) are those of men shot by Afghan men in Afghan uniform — their alleged allies.  More and more deaths in the last couple years are the result of troops being fired on by those they are allegedly allied to in this continual shithole of a country.  And yet, America goes on trying to negotiate a way to KEEP Americans in country for whatever strategic use that might be.

Fuck that noise, Valentines!  Tell your Congressional critters you want NO TROOPS left behind in that sandbox!   We allegedly went there to get Osama bin Laden and he is fucking “got” —so let’s get the hell OUT.

Filed under: War & No Peace Tagged: Afghanistan, war

We dug a grave on Valentine’s Day,

The white goose, dead and bloodied on winter ground,

Some hungry thing, inefficient — a mangler, no predator,

I looked, with grief, on her huge white wings,

And with envious thoughts.

Where could I go with such wings?

What could I over-fly on the high winter winds?

As an angry being, hyped on rage — a killer?

May fury be the feathers of my wings,

So I can hunt in dimming light.

Other graves were dug on Valentine’s Day,

Not for white geese, nor treasured small pets,

But for sons, husbands, brothers, lovers…

Winter killed for cold cash and colder lies,

Rage burns like chemotherapy.

How to kill the cancer of cash and corruption?

How to wake sleeping American dreamers?

How to shake them into recognition?

Wings that rattle in moon-lit nights,

Valkyrie anger, gilding feathers…avengers?

Tagged: death, poetry, war, war memorial

I want to go to Haiti.

This was how every call seemed to start. I’d answer the phone and the person on the other end, male or female, young or old, would tell me they wanted to go to Haiti to volunteer.

And I would tell them no.

In the summer of 2009, I had joined the flood of cast-offs torn from safer shores by the global economic collapse, joined them poring over Craigslist job postings and sitting primly in ill-fitting business-wear in temp agency offices. I spent that summer balanced against lampposts and building facades, switching from flip-flops to sweaty Payless pumps at the last possible second, stuffing the flip-flops deep into my bag and hoping they didn’t smell. Among the jobs I interviewed for: dental office front desk; admin for a babysitting company; personal assistant to a musical theatre composer. I spent two temp agency weeks putting labels on file folders at Ann Taylor’s corporate offices, hiding the cord of my headphones under my blouse so I could listen to podcasts while I worked, so maybe the monotony wouldn’t drive me insane.

I had applied for jobs in what I’d thought was my career field, too, my little life’s calling. But only about nine jobs in new play development existed in the city; one was open. My two years of experience at the job I had lost rendered me overqualified.

At the end of the summer, a friend forwarded a job listing from her office. “I don’t know if this is something you’d be interested in, but just in case?” She had left a career in fundraising for nonprofit theatres for one fundraising for this medical aid organization. And this organization needed someone, now, to answer the phones.

In theory, of course, I was a big supporter of humanitarian aid. Very glad it existed and all that. But I’d never thought about it with any more specificity. I had never felt compelled to leave the nonprofit arts for a true charity. That had been a thing for other people to do. My friend coached me through convincingly feigning a longstanding and specific interest in this organization’s work. The HR manager called to offer me the job in the middle of one of those midday naps of the somewhat-employed.

I was told on my first day that I could bring a book to read at the desk, feel free to check my e-mail or browse the Internet. It’ll get busy around tax season and at the end of the year, they said, but other than that it shouldn’t be anything stressful. Donors would call with questions, potential applicants would call baffled by the online application. Aid workers would come to our office, returning fresh from the field, six months in Sudan or somewhere like that, and I would be the first face they would see.

The job was part-time, but enough hours to qualify me for health insurance and paid me more than my old full-time job in theatre. I had never felt so taken care of by an employer.

The other part-time receptionist walked me around the office for introductions. I met men and women from all corners of the world—a doctor from New Zealand, a nurse from the Netherlands, a program coordinator with the gummy accent of southern France—all drawn to New York, now, for this. A sandy-haired Australian man, built like a Disney cartoon hero, ran Field Human Resources, the recruitment and hiring of the scores of medical and logistical workers stationed around the world, saving lives. There were Americans, too; some had been to the field, some hadn’t. Some were just there for a nice job with nice moral implications. About eighty people worked there. I had absolutely no confidence that I would remember any of their names.

They all smiled and welcomed me, but I felt very small when I sat down at the front desk.

I started in October. I got the hang of the phone system, got the hang of a job that I could leave entirely behind at the office. A perfectly nice job that had no impact on the rest of my life—this was new to me, and the stillness it lent to the rest of my life was appealing. Life was on hold. I was figuring things out, or would, eventually.

I wish I could say I read a lot of novels with all that time at the desk. Instead I read a lot of the Internet.

Things got a little busy just before New Year’s with end-of-year donations, and then the holiday ended, and the office exhaled.

A few months after I started, the office manager went on leave. The other receptionist took over that job, and I went full time to fill the gap. The part of this that matters is that there would be two trained receptionists full-time in the office when the earthquake hit.

I learned about the earthquake less than an hour after it occurred, from a phone call. No memos had gone out yet. No announcements. Just a phone call almost at the end of the day from a girl who sounded about my age.

“Hi, my friend’s working with you guys in Haiti—I just heard there was an earthquake there? And I wanted to make sure she’s okay.”

I didn’t know anything, but my protocol for a question about someone working in the field was to send the call back to Field Human Resources. I don’t know if anyone was even still there to answer the call. Ten or fifteen minutes later I put the phones on night service and headed home.

Leaving the office I rejoined the world, and that was where I got my news. In the little bubble world of work you know details (this sentence doesn’t make sense, I would suggest a delete). In the little bubble world of work you know people on the ground, one degree of separation away. In the whole world you get facts and figures from Anderson Cooper and wait for pictures from the newspaper and TV.

At 4:53 p.m. local time on January 12^th, 2010, local in Haiti and local in New York, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurred with its epicenter just east of the town of Leogane, about sixteen miles west of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

Over the next two weeks at least fifty-two aftershocks above magnitude 4.5 would be recorded. 250,000 homes and 30,000 commercial buildings were severely damaged or destroyed. The eventual report would be 316,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and one million people homeless.

The earthquake felt like everything then. Big news, the kind no one forgets. But it all blurs and fades. I don’t know if I’d even remember it at all if I hadn’t been answering the phones. I don’t expect anyone to be fresh on the details. I had to look them up myself.

The next morning I listened to the BBC news on the radio while I dressed for work. I took in the news with disorientation tinged with expectation, that this distant catastrophe would somehow have to do with me, that I would have a part to play. Rather than my usual jeans-and-whatever, I put on a skirt,tights, and black oxfords, and I walked in the office door that morning with purpose. At least before I took the phones off night service, before the deluge began, at least then I felt like a Serious Lady in my Serious Attire, ready for Serious Work.

When I got to work I didn’t notice the office feeling busier than usual, yet. I made my morning rounds. As always there were a few people in early; I turned on whatever hallway lights were still darkened. I emptied the office dishwasher. I had once told my mother that I did this when describing the job, and she had echoed, “You empty the dishwasher?” with a little bit of disappointment and disbelief. But the way I looked at it, my co-workers were doing good and noble work in the world, and if I could help make sure they had clean mugs for their coffee, so be it.

I sat at my desk at the front of the office. I opened up my email, and as the night’s memos and messages started to load, I pushed the little button that opened up the phones. And the phones started to ring.

Are you going to Haiti?

Everyone asked. We already had teams there, had had projects in Haiti for the last nineteen years. (Our staff was all okay—they had checked in overnight—but one of our hospitals was damaged beyond structural safety.) Any country that has needed international medical aid for the last nineteen years is not primed for a quick recovery. But we were there, yes, on the ground. I’d like to make a donation. I transferred them, or gave the address to mail a check, and hung up and the phone rang again. I’d like to make a donation. I want to go to Haiti.

I hung up. The phone rang again. The phone rang while I was still on the phone, all ten lines lighting up. We were an office, not a call center. Not the rows and rows of phones that were the backdrop to the president’s Red Cross photo op. If he’d come to be photographed with us—to deliver morale and a donation boost—it would’ve just been me and the other receptionist, just our ten lines and two phones, ringing all at once.

 More timezones woke up; more people saw the pictures on the news; more people called.

Updates came from all sides of the office—fundraising, communications, field recruitment, operations—and I read for updates, this privileged information, but I read to build my script, too. It’s been years now but I can still rattle it off:

 Right now we’re only taking people who have worked with us before, just our most experienced staff.

 Yes, you can make a donation just for Haiti

 Let me transfer you to someone in our press office.

 Around five p.m. that first day, a day full of adrenaline and the discovery of what this thing would be, two lanky Frenchmen from the office—the head of field communications and the head of operational programs—headed out the door with something like seven laptop cases hanging off their shoulders. I asked where they were going, and one of them answered in a thick French accent that gave the word three syllables: Haiti. And then they were out the door. I felt proud. I sat up a little straighter in my chair, leaned forward toward the door after they were gone.

I left that first day exhilarated and exhausted. I met my boyfriend for Thai food near the office. It was maybe the first day at this job that had left me with anything interesting to say. Something important was happening in the world, and thanks to nothing more than luck and a pleasant phone demeanor, I was part of it. As I told my boyfriend about my day, a part of me looked around to wonder if any of the other diners might hear my front desk stories and take note of my immediacy to the crisis. I wasn’t even sure that my immediacy was worth noting, but I wondered if someone else might think it was. I soothed my nerves with pad Thai and went home and straight to bed.

For the next week and a half, the phones rang relentlessly. I ordered a headset for my phone; my hands were liberated and my neck un-cricked, but sometimes it felt like the callers were inside my head. The phones rang so much that even with double receptionist coverage, we couldn’t leave the desk. Nonstop, all lines at once. Co-workers brought food to us trapped at the front desk: chocolate-covered almonds, pizza, a clementine dropped off with a blown kiss.

On the second or third day, once it became clear that this was not a quick spike of call traffic, we started training each department’s assistant to be able to cover the phones. I typed up a cheat sheet—the answers to common questions, which calls got transferred to whom, the basic scripts. It felt good to know what I was doing. After months feeling like a quiet imposter in this world, I had knowledge to share, and could help people.

They called with questions, but mostly they called with things to give. Supplies, medicine, time. And my job was to say no.

No, we can’t take your old blankets. We have blankets, we have a logistics warehouse in France full of them. No, can’t take your expired prescription medications. Even if they are unopened. Even if they are still wrapped. Yes, people in Haiti need medicine. People everywhere need medicine. But the human and financial expenditure to organize and make uniform a thousand people’s leftovers far outstrips the simple cost of buying the stuff ourselves, in nice, disaster-ready assemblies. Sometimes people understood. What you really need is money? Great, then: credit card or check? But mostly they didn’t want to hear that what they had to offer—supplies, medicine, healing herbs—wasn’t needed.

On one of the calmer calls, a woman donating money said, “We only give when there’s an emergency.” She also said, “We want to feel that we’re doing something right.” Everyone wanted to feel better, and I couldn’t help them.

It was harder convincing the volunteers. I’m a nurse. I speak Creole. I speak Spanish. I have two hands and want to go. The endless refrain in the newspapers and on TV was the dire need for help. People were trapped under buildings. People were dying. People were dead. And there was not nearly enough help. We weren’t even a volunteer organization; our field staff got hired and paid. But how could volunteers not be needed?

It didn’t matter if I explained that we were only taking our most experienced staff into this emergency relief situation. It didn’t matter that we had scores of experienced American field workers ready to get on planes, but limited supplies, limited resources in Haiti, limited access to get in. Everyone wanted to feel better about the situation. Everyone wanted to help. The island was close, the devastation was horrific. I understand how it seemed illogical. Worse, how it seemed like I was sentencing people to die because I was denying them help.

When I explained why they couldn’t volunteer, people yelled at me. Called it arrogance that we wouldn’t take them. Arrogance rather than prudence for not just putting anyone who wanted to help on a plane and dropping them off in Port Au Prince with a pair of gardening gloves, in front of what used to be an apartment building or market or school and saying, “Go to it! Good luck!” I think this is what people really wanted.

I’m sorry, sir, if you’d like to apply to work with us, you can go to our website, under “work in the field.”

With our organization, you’re not able to apply to work in a specific country, but you apply to work with us in general.

The application and screening process can take several weeks or months.

One man answered, “A few months? It’ll be over by then!” He wasn’t getting the internal memos, he hadn’t been filled in on the years of work we’d been doing in Haiti, the great needs that two decades of interventions could not meet. And now an earthquake on top of that. But I probably would’ve thought the same thing if I hadn’t been sitting at that desk.

I know that what you’re seeing on the news is horrific, and you want to help, but we can only take staff whom we’ve trained, we can’t take more people than we can put to work.

I’m sorry.

I understand.

Perhaps it felt easier for me to say no because it never would have occurred to me to volunteer. If I had been a nurse, sure, maybe. But I wasn’t a nurse. But neither were many of the people calling, with their bags already half-packed. I was talking sense to them—come back to reality where you and I stay here, where we watch the news and donate ten dollars by sending a text.

It was only an accident that I was working where I was, that I had any involvement— any awareness, even—at all. Yet, there I was, the little gatekeeper.

I spent ten minutes on the phone with one girl. She was ready to fly to the Dominican Republic and walk straight across Hispaniola to the wreckage.

“It’s not that we don’t need help, it’s not that the situation isn’t dire. But even if you were able to hitch a ride from the Dominican Republic, think of the whole picture.Where will you sleep? How will you get water to drink? What will happen to you if you, hitch-hiker and unaffiliated, get sick or hurt?”

There was a lull in the calls and she was breaking my heart, so I managed to stay on the line. She couldn’t tell me how she would find drinking water for herself – she said questions like that were keeping her up at night. By the end, I think I convinced her not to go. I hoped so.

When there was a full-office briefing, everyone filed into the biggest conference room we had. There were updates from every department—logistics, fundraising, press—and news from teams on the ground. But we two receptionists stayed at the phones, answering the nonstop calls. It felt right, I was doing my work. But it also felt a bit lonely. I was running interference so everyone else could hear about the work, so the work could get done.

One small brightness in all this was the organization we recommended to people wanted to donate prosthetic limbs. That organization was called A Leg to Stand On. Enough people called wanting to donate prosthetics that a woman from A Leg to Stand On called to thank us for all the donations we were sending their way. A Leg to Stand On. I never stopped loving that name.

Early on, our supply planes were blocked from the one runway in Port Au Prince, displaced for U.S. military planes or, one time, American press. We put out a news release decrying the congestion, and although the issue was resolved within days, concerned and misinformed calls came in long after. Have your planes been able to land? Oh good. Sometimes people didn’t believe me when I said yes. Oh, but I heard—and I’d say, Ma’am, I promise. One man offered his connections with the CIA. Something about the Pentagon that I never understood. Something about Cuba. I made wide, help-me eyes at the other receptionist while I calmly said, “No, sir, I don’t know what’s going on with the Cubans. But thank you for your help.” He called a few times—I think he thought that he had cleared the runway himself.

 The calls were so strange that I started taking notes, recording scraps of this world in which I’d unexpectedly found myself, wanting to save each ephemeral token of humanity.

 “I only had seventy dollars to live on, so I donated fifty.”

 “Haiti doesn’t need me. The mountains need me. The hills need me. The children need me. I’m not interested in Port au Prince. Port au Prince has enough. I’m saying what’s going on in the mountains. I’m saying when you have 200,000 people in the mountains and seventeen doctors. I’m an intelligent man. I can add.”

 ”God bless you.” To which I couldn’t help but answer, “You too.”

 I sorted the massive bags of mail our postal carrier was bringing. Donation checks had to be forwarded along to be processed; envelopes that were not obviously either donations or correspondence had to be opened. We weren’t able to answer the unsolicited letters, but I read them.

“Please accept the funds (5,115 US), 77 from scrap metal, 28 from deposit refund bottles/cans (Perrier & Orangina work!) 5,000 from my vacation plan for 2010.”

“For your consideration. I have three weeks vacation last week March first two April. I am a union electrican and have worked in harsh environment doing new construction… Temperatures as high as 122F (50C).” [sic] (not sure if she wanted to keep this messed up…I am assuming yes).

 “I could help you rebuild your operations in Port au Prince Haiti.”

 “I do not speak French but could take a crash course using ‘Rosetta Stone.’”

“I could brush up on my morse code with the Amateur Radio Relay League in Connecticut.”

“The only negative aspect is I am suffering from depression. Which I have learned to live with during the past five years.”

“Keep going no matter what.”

I started to lose my voice during the first week. That day or the next I took a nap in the server closet, wrapped up in my puffy red winter coat. It wasn’t a secret—I think I told my boss, “I’m going to lie down for ten minutes in the server closet.” But the time was a thing I snuck, stolen from the people calling who needed so much from me.

People in shirts bearing the logo that was stenciled on the wall behind my desk were performing life-saving surgeries in tents. People were trapped under rubble. I was safe and warm in an office.

But my coworkers were bringing me food, and they were thanking me. They were admiring my work. They said, over and over, I don’t know how you do it. These were people who had worked in the field, who advocated at the UN, who did real and important things in the world and were daily saving lives. I knew I was working maybe the hardest I ever had, but that couldn’t be a universal measure.

People who entered the office as receptionists and assistants often left to go work in the field. One communications assistant left for nursing school so she could work in the field, the programs assistant went to Uganda as a logistician, the field human resources assistant who’d been the receptionist before me left for the brand new nation of South Sudan. Even my friend from college, who worked in corporate fundraising, spent a month in Uganda. Field workers coming through the office would ask me this, the given small-talk, So when are you going to the field? After the earthquake my coworkers started asking me, too. But my answer started with a vigorous shake of my head. Oh no. Not me. Not ever. I’m good at organizing, good at getting things done—I probably have what it takes to make a decent field coordinator. Except for the part about the field. I’d laugh it off, saying, I’m too attached to warm showers and not having sand in my food. But the truth went deeper. I wasn’t strong enough to hack it. I knew how hard things were in the field, I knew a little about the horrible things going on in the world, and I knew I couldn’t handle them face to face.

I could intercept the crazy phone calls, though. I could lighten the load for the human resources team placing doctors and nurses in the field, the fundraisers making the work possible, the communications team letting the world know. I could answer the easy questions that were hard because of their volume, and I would accept my co-workers’ thanks for this.

When donations are earmarked for a specific country or cause—in this case I was relaying to donors that they should write “Haiti earthquake” on their checks—the organization legally cannot use them for anything else. It took two weeks for donations for the earthquake to reach our projected two-year budget for the response. Our executive director’s thinking was that even though we would be in Haiti for years and years to come, people restricting their donations to Haiti right now wanted their money to go to the emergency earthquake response. More than two years out, our work in Haiti wouldn’t be that.

We took the option to earmark for Haiti off the website’s donation form, to slow the restricted donations down. But the stymied donors just picked up their phones, and I had to add a new script to my repertoire:

We’re actually no longer taking online donations specifically for Haiti, but you can donate online to our emergency relief fund. This fund is for emergencies such as the earthquake in Haiti, and also emergencies that are less in the media spotlight. It’s this fund that allowed us to respond immediately to the situation in Haiti without having to wait for specifically earmarked donations to come in, and it will also allow us to respond immediately to whatever happens next.

Four out of five times they’d let me finish my spiel and say, Yeah, but I want my money to just go to Haiti. There was fighting in Somalia, a refugee crisis in Pakistan, a malaria epidemic in Burundi, but this was not on the news. The woman who’d called and said, “We only give when there’s an emergency” hadn’t known there are emergencies everywhere all the time. Six months ago, neither had I.

Soon enough, the world started to move on from Haiti, and my phones quieted down. If I’d had any other job, I would have been at the leading edge of that forgetting. A few days of news, and move on. Instead I kept reading the emails and updates. Instead I answered the straggling calls. They faded into questions about already made donations and requests for posters for fundraisers.

Eventually even those faded away. A year later, there would be the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Months after that, a famine in Somalia. And I would eventually leave this job. And I would never go to the field.

But not everyone can be in the field, and that is not always a bad thing. Someone has to earn money to write checks. Someone has to organize a fundraiser. Someone has to answer the phone and say no. I’m sorry, and thank you, but no.

***

Listen to Jaime read her essay:

Featured image credit

Second image credit

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Edwidge Danticat
• THE LONELY VOICE #23: It Doesn’t Fit, It Will Never Fit, It Fits
• Post-Quake San Francisco
• In the Manner of Water or Light
• East Coast Quake Follow Up

Context: I tasked my fifteen-year-old daughter with ordering food from the local pizzeria.

Athena: Dad!

Me: What?

Athena: I tried calling the pizza place but  I got a weird noise.

Me: Like what?

Athena: “Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.”

Me: …. That’s called a “busy signal.”

Athena: Okay. What does that mean? 

Me: It means someone else was calling them and they were on the phone when you called.

Athena: …. Well, whatever. What do I do now?

Me: Try calling again in a minute.

Athena: (Sighs) Fine.

Me: You… you really didn’t know what a busy signal was?

Athena: I’d heard of them.

Me: Hmmmmmmm.

Athena: I’m going call them again now.

Me: Okay. I’m going to sit over here, being old.

“

I once told a joke about a straight person.

They came after me in droves.

Each one singing the same:

Don’t fight fire with fire.

*

What they mean is: Don’t fight fire with anything.

Do not fight fire with water.

Do not fight fire with foam.

Do not evacuate the people.

Do not sound the alarms.

Do not crawl coughing and choking and spluttering to safety.

Do not barricade the door with damp towels.

Do not wave a white flag out of the window.

Do not take the plunge from several storeys up.

Do not shed a tear for your lover trapped behind a wall of flame.

Do not curse the combination of fuel, heat, and oxygen.

Do not ask why the fire fighters are not coming.

*

When they say: Don’t fight fire with fire.

What they mean is: Stand and burn.

”

-

Stand and Burn by Claudia Boleyn.  (via claudiaboleyn)

You also can’t pre-emptively fight fire either.  You can’t educate people about fire safety, and not starting fires, you can’t talk about the dangers of fire, or that fire kills people, because then you’re accusing everybody of being an arsonist and that’s bad and you’re being mean.  But after you get burnt, you’re not allowed to be angry or hurt.  That’s when everybody says you’re supposed to educate.

Screencaps with permission from Rachel.  I included the whole convo so people can see I’m not putting her words in a context she didn’t intend.

The last part especially is something that I’ve thought a lot about lately too, especially what it means to say you’re “not okay” and how we construct it in our society that everybody has to be “okay” or “fine”.  Like, I don’t want to cover up how I feel, and I want people to know because they’d understand I’m not in a great way, but that doesn’t mean the conversation has to stop, or everybody has to ask me how I’m doing.  But at the same time, it’s important to know if others aren’t okay because you might want to be considerate of that.  And how so much of the way society constructs social interactions and “polite discourse” doesn’t allow for that.  You have to be okay, and a lot of people don’t feel okay, but don’t want to talk about it, or there’s nothing really to talk about or “fix”.  Like when people ask me what’s wrong, I can’t really say more than dysphoria, anxiety, depression, eating disorder.  It’s the stuff I live with, and I don’t want to act like I don’t deal with it, but there’s nothing that can be immediately fixed, and I do just want to hang out with people, but also that people should know?  I mean if you know I have an ED then you understand if I don’t want to eat food, or if food is stressful for me.  It doesn’t mean you can’t ask “do you want to talk about it?” because sometimes people do, and sometimes people are saying “I’m not okay” because they want to talk or somebody to listen and don’t know how to approach others, but if people say no it’s fine, then don’t push or act like you have to fix it.  Or maybe people do want to talk about it but don’t welcome you to offer unsolicited advice on how to fix it.

And I was thinking about this in a larger macro sense.  That for a lot of marginalized groups, things are not okay, and it’s something they live with, that people should be cognizant of, but that isn’t something that they want to talk to you about all the time, or for you to fix it for them, because you can’t.  I linked the two together because I realized what I sometimes deal with in a personal micro sense, is something I get when I talk about larger systemic or institutional problems too.  Like, when I wrote my post recently about the things cis people have done to me, I got a lot of responses from cis people that were like “find a better doctor” or “meet nicer people” as a solution.  But that’s not one, because it doesn’t change the larger aspect of society, or that I will still run into these things because of the larger issues.  My fears are not going away.  My not okayness is not going away.  I know it makes cis people uncomfortable that trans people are scared, but there seems to be this either/or thing where EITHER I have to pretend everything is okay and not talk about it or even mention that I’m not okay with society OR they have to address it immediately, I have to tell them all the details and they have to tell me a solution and then it’ll go away and they don’t have to think about it. 

There’s such a “suck it up” or “find solutions” dichotomy that society presents with no middle ground, and people play out this dynamic in a macro and micro sense in their interactions. and it’s really frustrating.  A lot of people are not “fine” in their lives, but it’s still our lives, and we try our best to get on with it.  We don’t want to have to pretend everything is great to hang out with you, but we also don’t want the entire focus to be about why we’re not okay and how to fix it.  You can be aware and considerate of the troubles others are going through without treating them like that’s all there is to them. 

I’m still struggling to blog.  Not for lack of topic, damn it; but because there is so much to rant, rave, and freak the hell out about that I feel it is becoming pointless.  So, yes, this is why we can’t have nice things a normal discussion, rationally and realistically grounded.  Because it has become systematic that there is an abuse of both language and thought,  and it leans into a surreal level of racist bullshit, as revealed in this article about a white man who shot into a vehicle full of black teens because he felt “threatened” by their “rap crap” music and the fact that they WERE black and “… jail is full of blacks, and they all act like thugs. … but if more people would arm themselves and kill these **** idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”

Damn.  I often perceive a sense of threat.  I guess I am really fucking up, cause not only have I not taken to packing heat — I haven’t shot anyone!  Of course, the threat I often perceive has nothing to do with color; I live in a rather reactive Republican county on the ‘blue’ side of my home state.  I get shouted at at intersections for having a pro-union bumper sticker.  I get fists shaken at me for bumper stickers in favor of Planned Parenthood, for pity’s sake.  Gee, can I get a “Stand your ground, AMEN!” for shooting WHITE morons who act like thugs?  Not very bloody likely, is it?

But Trayvvon Martin is dead for walking while black, and his killer got away with it.  So, now?  Every white guy in Florida with an inferiority complex, un-dealt with fears and a gun basically feels enabled to shoot anyone who “threatens” them — with music, with popcorn, with being black in public?

Of course, a black woman who fired shots in the AIR, to scare off an abuser who was violating a protection order was convicted and sent to jail— no “stand your ground” for women, especially armed black ones!  Even when a new trial overturned her conviction, it was on a technicality and STILL denied that self-defense OR stand-your-ground laws applied to her situation.  Thus, it seems to me, that in Florida, only white men are allowed to stand their ground.  As the terrible facts of the linked article reveal, it is not only Florida suffering a case of branding any non-white skin as some sort of legal mark of Cain — obviously guilty of some crime and deserving of death.

I once could read any level of horror in history or news and comment fearlessly upon it, analyzing and ripping in verbally.  I feel I am losing that ability, overwhelmed with the horror of watching my country fall into a dark age of racism with a side order of religious mania.  The desire shared by entirely too many of my fellow citizens to not be swayed by facts and logic in order to cling to beloved beliefs (even horrifically wrong, unethical beliefs) shocks me to a level of despair that makes me want to run away from the news altogether.

At a certain point, one wonders, if opinion — expressed in writing to friends, the public, elected officials — reaps no positive result, why bother?  What is the use of participation at that point?  To keep inundating myself with the horrors happening around my country is maddening; this IS the sort of thing, with no relief in sight FROM government that makes people go a bit loony.  This IS what radicalizes people who feel they have nothing left to lose.  Me?  I AM white, I am not starving or homeless.  If you took away any two of those three American social insurance policies?  Well, hey, then I well might be looking for a way to level the playing ground that was not on the legal books.

So, if I fall silent — no, it is not because I am out looking for a target, it is because I have fallen deeply into horrifying reveries about just how many Americans might be drawing to that same spot of desperation and despair without relief or notice from those in power.  I see that desperation in white people often enough — but they label the WRONG causes (‘black thugs’, Obama, fucking liberals, environmentalist hippies). Mostly, to me, they seem terrified that other people dispossessed by processes that have, until now, protected all but the poorest of whites, might finally take BACK what they lost.  If I believed in Karma, I’d say she is a long-memoried bitch! Unless every desperate American can find and label the right cause and unite to legally change the course? The effect is going to be … well, I’m trying to keep my mind from that edge.

Filed under: Life, Politics, PTSD Journals, War & No Peace, WTUnholyF? Tagged: death, desperation, guns, racism, radicalization

Every time I see “you’re not queer enough” or “you’re not kinky enough” all I want to is put up another sign on my proverbial front lawn that says “have the sex you want, with the people you love, and if you have the energy create the space for others to do the same.”

Sometimes I also want to stand on my front lawn and scream “who the hell cares!” But I don’t, because sex is actually really important.  And group belonging can be very important.  So this whole thing breaks my heart from all directions.  And then I remember that time a friend and I had an argument about it, and he was sitting on the stairs later, trying to pacify me I think, and he says “it’s bad for everyone but for some people the good outweighs the bad.” And that’s true, but what he missed was that my heart broke in that moment.  Sex is powerful and intimate and beautiful.  It has the power to connect us and make use feel whole.  People risk beating and jail time for the right to have sex they want with the people they love.  And you want to take this precious, beautiful thing and put it in a place that’s “bad for everyone”? No.  We can do better.

That friend was defending the BDSM scene.  But then I see people who realize that the BDSM scene is sorta a cult of personality, or it’s broken in some way.  Specifically it’s broken in that it hides abuse and puts itself out there as the only place to have safe kinky sex at the same time.  So people try to break away from that, but then they police their new borders even more thoroughly.  It’s the lavender menace all over again.

So I guess what I really want to say is that people have been trying to tell others how to have sex for 5000 years.  Just because they are a leather title holder or they are a radical anti-bdsm queer fairy, doesn’t give them any more say-so about what you and your partner do wherever you do it.

Another friend told me a while back that “there is no such thing as radical sex.” You can work for cultural change, you can try to change social views such that everyone feels accepted and open about their sexuality.  You can work to educate people about consent and change the frameworks we use to talk about it. But when the bedroom door closes, whatever you do, it’s about you and the person or people you’re with, and it’s normal and perfect.

Snow and ice blanket America, and most citizens are consumed with thoughts of getting to a job if they have one, finding one if they do not, and how to not get sidelined on a highway where the family vehicle will end up expensively impounded. Perhaps thus, at this time of year, one could forgive them for not thinking about some faceless American citizen abroad facing death from above —all awaiting the word of his President. No trial, even in absentia, just a President’s word.

“But he is a terrorist,” someone will whine at me. He is an accused terrorist, an alleged terrorist, America. If a judge, a court officer, a reporter picked ANY criminal not yet officially convicted and referred to them as “murderer”, “rapist”, “thief”; they’d get a legal rap across the knuckles or teeth. But since 9-11, if a President or his minions and yes-men label someone an “enemy combatant” it means there are no Constitutional rights at all — even for citizens of this country. And America will engage in the illegal practice of murder-by-drone even in foreign nations where we could embroil ourselves in another ruinous war. Because drones sometimes kill more than the target, as when we also killed a 16 year old son of al-Awlaki, the chosen victim…can you even imagine American rage is some other nation killed several people HERE because one of them had been accused of a crime in their nation?

It really is not that complex, not only does American law actually forbid such extra-judicial punishment and mayhem — but it is as simple as “do/don’t do unto others”. IF you would be enraged and screaming how wrong it is if some other nation did it to US, it is wrong for us. After all, a foreign national of another nation DID decide punishment was merited for what he felt were guilty Americans: Osama bin Laden sent his chosen “drones” to fly airplanes into sites FULL of his idea of guilty Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. If it was wrong when HE did it merely because he was not an elected official of his home nation; why is it alright for our elected President to commit murder abroad despite the fury of other sovereign nations?

If this sort of thing continues? How long until a drone is sent sailing over Russian soil to kill Snowden? Or Assange? Or anyone else that pisses off an American president? Tell me, do the terrorists win when we adopt their own methods of murder and call it law?

Filed under: Politics, War & No Peace Tagged: constitutional-toilet-paper, it-isn't-illegal-if-the-president-does-it, murder

A very important point:

A few minutes after he signed the Civil Rights Acton July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Hubert Humphrey, who had led the fight for its passage in the Senate, with a copy of his signing speech. On it, the president wrote, “without whom it couldn’t have happened.”

Johnson wasn’t one to share credit easily, but he understood a simple fact about Washington: Humphrey—and the dozens of other people who made the bill happen—would be relegated to a footnote, and history would give credit to the man who signed it. And he was right. Three days later, The New York Times credited Johnson as “the man who pushed [the bill] through Congress.”

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, and the impression that Johnson single-handedly drove his forces in the Senate, manipulating his opponents with flawless ease, has only grown with time. In the latest volume of his acclaimed Johnson biography, 2012’s The Passage of Power, Robert Caro largely parrots Johnson’s own account of the period: “It was a struggle,” he writes, “whose strategy and day-by-day tactics were laid out and directed by him.” And the play All the Way, which opened last fall with “Breaking Bad”’s Bryan Cranston in the role of Johnson, likewise portrays the president as the omniscient political manipulator.

But this is mostly myth. Johnson had many legislative achievements during his pres­idency, but on the Civil Rights Act, he was largely ignored by his Senate allies and rebuffed by the recipients of his bear-hugging affection.

The one thing I would add is that while some of Caro’s rhetoric in The Passage of Power can get a little green lanterny in his description of the mechanics he’s still pretty clear that Congress was in the driver’s seat. If Harry Byrd’s top priority was still to oppose civil rights, he could have kept the bill bottled up for as long as he wanted. At any rate, the Civil Rights Act is an excellent example of the fundamental truth that the White House is where campaigns for political change end, not where they begin. A president can make some changes marginally more likely and can certainly obstruct change, but they don’t effect change by imposing their will on Congress. That’s not what LBJ did and it’s not what FDR did either.

None of this changes the obvious fact that Obama totally could have gotten single payer with some speeches, some threats to primary people who aren’t running for anything, stuff like that there.

Thursday afternoon I received a text from my drummer indicating that that evenings rehearsal would start as a run-through at his place then head to a space about five minutes away where he indicated I would see eight Marshall stacks and what would prove to be two full drum-sets previously owned by Kenny Aranoff. The picture of what a version of Musical Valhalla might begin to look like to me was taken by my phone after my initial freekout was allowed (once I cleared the top of the landing and allowed my lower jaw to return to its normal location I did a quick count and informed my buddy that there were not eight stacks but in fact nine, at which point I went immediately to my spot where the four string was-extreme right side of the picture examined the insane wall of speakers and amps, studied the drum kits in detail.) I returned to the three waiting on the other end of the room.

I am pretty sure that the owner of the place gets a kick when a musician that has never seen it arrives, and I am certain that I followed a predictable script, one which he has seen several times.

Once back I was alerted to the ground rules, which started with asking me if I would be offended by the presence of smoking and my answer was a firm no, to which his reply was “perfect” then followed by an inquiry about whether I would like wine, whiskey or beer, “I’ll start with a beer.” “Perfect.” And no sooner than that, a 16 oz can of Bitburger was thrust into my hands, shortly after that a cigarette, after which, I was informed that in these jam sessions “We don’t do covers” I said “Cool; generally speaking, neither do I.”

At this point his partner in crime stepped in to ask me about what I played and whether I would be interested in playing other instruments. I explained that that would not be a problem at all, but given that there was only one person in the room with which I had played previously and the fact that we were going to be pulling shit out of our ass that I would prefer to start with the four string.

After that was sorted, and my request to take some pictures was granted and that mission accomplished we started for the wall of 9 amplifiers and 72 speakers. And I knew that I had just become acquainted with two nut-jobs that were right up my alley. After about 20 minutes of jamming in the keys of E and A I inquired of the partner in crime if it might be possible to introduce a little structure, as in say start in A, shift somewhere in the middle to a diminshed minor 7th and finish in say D minor or F. He was not opposed to the idea, but indicated that he was not quite sure what I was on about.

We took a break after that for a dinner that I had not been aware was in the offering and it was delicious. My buddy and I had, prior to arrival , snarfed down some chips, salsa, and guacamole, but the short workout had managed to reinvigorate our appetites.

After dinner we retired to the studio and played for another hour and a half. I had the pleasure of pounding on both drum kits and thought about taking the 88 key keyboard for a stroll, but that will wait for another day.

A blast was had by all, I was given an open invitation to return and participate in future jams at the joint and provided with a roadie…namaste!

Postscript and Prelude.

As we entered the house and were walking through the garage the owners buddy made a point of mentioning that his pal had an electric car. I’ll have to admit that with the vision of Marshall stacks running through my head I had given the sleek blackness little thought. Wheeling around and laying my eye on the rear end I exclaimed something along the lines of “Holy shit, a Tesla”
which seemed to surprise the partner in crime who asked “You are familiar with them?” as I began the requisite “are you fucking kidding me” lap around the little thing swabbed in carbon fiber, studying the lines, the two seated interior, recalling that I was looking at a sub 4 second to 60mph vehicle…Stifling the urge to ask about looking under the hood and recognizing that a day was being made…

As I was attempting to remain on my best behavior and knowing that there might be a wall of music waiting…Actually the existence of the Tesla kinda confirmed what awaited upstairs…We started upwards towards a room that would re-blow my mind.

Thursday was a perfect distillation of why I will have to sell the auto-bio as a work of fiction. A day that started with possibly ferreting out the identity of our resident pustule, followed by a wheel build (lacing, actually, one spoke shy) ending in Musical Nirvana that began with the coolest thing I have ever seen (I have yet to visit the Louvre)…Days like these do not often come my way, but for some reason they do tend to seek me out.

Now I would like to dig through the crate filled with bags of fancy hammers and take a certain cartoonist to task. The party in question embodies everything that wingnut welfare, balance, and the scourge of mediocrity has wrought upon not only the body politic in general but humanity at large.

Some of you may be familiar with the work of Edward Bruce Tinsley the fourth for he is the auteur behind the Mallard Fillmore Comic strip syndicated by King Features. He became an editorial comic writer because some ass clown at the Washington Times King Features was interested in “balance” feeling the need to add halfwit lacking wit to whatever truth based, facts have a Liberal bias, cartoonist was being published at the time. Oddly enough while there were idiots with megaphones in the early nineties, It had not yet come to pass that being an abject idiot was regularly within the intersection of a Venn diagram with circles consisting of sets “cool” and “well off.” Unfortunately we have come to a place in time and space where being a vacuous dunderheaded asshat can pay the bills. Hell it is what keeps the doors of this place open. Random offering of a piece of Tinsleys “work”

Aside from the fact that IT IS ALWAYS PROJECTION for this particular Octoplexipus the number of logical phallusies, tendentious rendering of history, us v themisms, and missing points like baseball teams missing pitches thrown by Bob Gibson on his best day in 1968 or 1967.

Such is the density of stupid piled upon moronity that frequently serves as humor in Bruce’s “art” that one familiar with physics might wonder why a singularity has not swallowed up the building housing their local fishwrap. The foil in his “gags” is always a straw liberal of the type that only exists in the fevered imaginings of someone who is likely to spend half a night worrying if a terrorist is lying in wait under their beds or people who mainline Megan Kelly and Fox News, though now that think about it, that Venn diagram almost certainly would be indistinguishable from a single circle.

From his
blog:

In this comic strip, you get 382 percent more asterisks than in Doonesbury*. Mallard Fillmore has more asterisks than an MLB record-book. Why? So you can check out the sources of the outrageous assertions and iconoclastic animadversions I put in my little comic strip. Because I try to give you the scoop that the mainstream media don’t. Lots of readers find my valuable information so incredible, that they think it must BE incredible.Hence the *s.

My favorite kind of emails are the ones that start out, “I didn’t believe you, but I checked it out”, and end with “why wasn’t THAT on the news?”

I’m not gonna bother to unpack this one, but do note a familiar tone, arrogance and fractured syntax that lead me to speculations concerning the identity of a certain tenacious resident underpass dweller. While it is possible that the shartiste, Edward Bruce Tinsley the fourth is not the the troll that when not nym-jacking goes by the nom de plume of Dennis, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

(1) Thanks,Skippy, for helping me NOT allay my own terror over Fukushima.

(2)BBBB reminds me of the answer to “How Stupid Are They?” questions — damn it, why am I out of ice cubes?

(3) This is why there is more “schaden” than “freude” and I don’t have any pie, either.

(4) Last call for common sense: banks don’t want your cash deposits? Because the banksters worry it might be ill-gotten gains? Let’s see…THEY ripped off the nation, they can’t keep my debit cards safe, I refuse their credit cards and now they don’t like my cash?

That’s it…I quit for the day. And hey, if the title is ugly? Be grateful I didn’t inflict it upon you in German!

Filed under: Politics Tagged: economics, fukushima, ignorance, poverty, radiation

Couples Sue to Force Ohio’s Hand on Gay Marriage:

CINCINNATI (AP) — Four legally married gay couples filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Monday seeking a court order to force Ohio to recognize same-sex marriages on birth certificates despite a statewide ban, echoing arguments in a similar successful lawsuit concerning death certificates.

The couples filed the suit in federal court in Cincinnati, arguing that the state’s practice of listing only one partner in a gay marriage as a parent on birth certificates violates the U.S. Constitution.

“We want to be afforded the same benefits and rights as every other citizen of the United States,” said one of the plaintiffs, Joe Vitale, 45, who lives in Manhattan with his husband and their adopted 10-month-old son, who was born in Ohio. The pair married in 2011 shortly after New York legalized gay marriage.

A spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, whose office will fight the lawsuit, declined to comment.

Good for them; I hope the plaintiffs win. It’s embarrassing for the state I live in — and which I have lived in for a dozen years, and which I like quite a bit — not to offer equal rights to all of its citizens. Hopefully this takes us further down that road.

While I’m at it, good on the federal government for expanding benefits and services to married same-sex couples, even if they live in a state that doesn’t recognize their union (like, for instance, Ohio). I think it makes it more difficult for these states to continue the calumny that some marriages should be treated with more respect and recognition than others. Again: Good.

Friday is Valentine’s Day, that special day wherein we celebrate patriarchal norms and reinforce insulting gender stereotypes with rampant consumerism. So romantic. Valentine’s Day is one of the those special “off” days that happen every-so-often in the strip club. Working the night of one these off days is never business-as-usual—it’s usually, business-as-oh-my-God-did-that-just-happen. The day of […]

I worked quite hard this past weekend, what with re-arranging my little Haven here, moving almost 2/3 of all furnishings around (and still never found the missing blood orange half!), and shoveling snow, and figuring how to stretch the money we saved to re-model the kitchen in the big house as is needed after 23 years of very hard use of a very cheap make-over done on our amateurish own in 1990.  So, I feel like not exerting myself much at all today!

I am ignoring mending/sewing tasks.  The snow is melting outside today under the combined assaults of rain and sun breaks.  I belatedly made myself eat breakfast –some goat-milk yogurt and one of those damned tricksy blood oranges.  Before I eat each of these delectable and costly oranges, I save the skin for cooking by zesting it and drying the results.  There is my zester and the resultant red-orange bits to be dried to deliciousness:

Now, I will obediently take my supplements — capsulized turmeric and ginger for inflammation and pain-fighting, essential fatty acids (salmon, evening primrose and borage oils) to keep fibromyalgia at bay, and vitamin D to ward off winter depression.  I’ve exercised already.  Now, I will be constructively lazy for the rest of the day until it is time to cook dinner.

Don’t take Mondays TOO seriously, ok?  It is perfectly acceptable to fart off the occasional Monday in the interests of physical and mental health!

Tagged: food, healing, mental health, rest

Conflicts between “rowdies” and other prisoners interrupted the daily routines of several, if not all, the camps. At the Gila River camp in Arizona, for instance, the editors of the center’s newspaper complained that zoot suiters had swiped all the chains from the laundry sinks to use as watch chains.

Nikkei Chicago’s Ellen Wu has a super fascinating article up about a subculture most of us have forgotten: Japanese-American zoot-suiters, or “pachuke” (the Japanese version of “pachuco”). The trend persisted even in internment camps, and troubled both Japanese parents and mainstream America in ways that still seem relevant decades later. (Via.)

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When you think of men and the 19th century, you probably think of beards. Large, ridiculous beards unseen again in American life until the early 21st century. Moreover, the beards of those days were ubiquitous. They were a sign of respectability and manliness. Ads abounded for beard-growing aids for those (like me) who really couldn’t do it naturally.

But it wasn’t always such. In fact, beards were strongly disdained in the clean-shaven first half of the 19th century. And when they did start showing up, they were tied into the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution in the North, what with its Mormons and Shakers and canals and trains and free love communities and abolitionism and women’s suffrage movement and transcendentalism and then its beards. These social movements faced a lot of resistance. Some is more well-known–the violence against Mormons for instance. But the Finneyite revivals in western New York disgusted many as well, especially in the working class. And so when reformer and intentional community member Joseph Palmer grew out his beard, the response from his town of Fitchburg, Massachusetts was much more severe than you’d expect:

He was described as a kind and tolerant man, but life was not easy for Joseph Palmer after he moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1830. People would openly insult him, throw rocks at him, regularly break the windows of his home, and even cross the street so as not to be near him when he passed by. Even though he was deeply religious man who regularly attended church services, Palmer was publicly denounced during sermons by his pastor, Rev. George Trask, and even refused communion.

What awful thing had this small town butcher done to warrant such persecution? Joseph Palmer’s crime was that he was the only citizen in Fitchburg, Massachusetts who chose to wear a full beard, which (contrary to my vision of the 1800′s being a beard grower’s paradise) had been out of fashion in the United States since the time of the Pilgrims.

In fact, Palmer was so reviled that in 1830, while walking out of the Old Fitchburg Hotel, he was attacked by four men who attempted to forcefully shave his beard on the grounds that his beard was immoral. Palmer was thrown on the stone stairs, and even though he was a muscular, 200 pound farmer, he was unable to repel the four men and resorted to stabbing two of his assailants in the legs with his jackknife. His attackers were only hurt badly enough to curtail their efforts, but Palmer was arrested and fined for committing an unprovoked assault. Even though he had the resources, he refused to pay the fine on principle, and was jailed as a debtor in the Worcester city jail. He spent over a year in prison, during which time he repelled two more attempts by jailers and prisoners who sought to shave his beard against his will.

Palmer would be quietly released thanks to the large amount of bad press that was generated by his story as it wound its way through the national newspapers, but he would refuse to leave until he could secure a proclamation that it was perfectly acceptable to wear a beard. He was never given that assurance, and he was eventually tied to a chair and carried out of the jail against his will.

Of course, times and fashions changed and Palmer was vindicated by the time of his death to say the least. More information on the bearded one here.

I get Department of Defense emails and news releases.  And yes, these are folks that would not  be allowed to manage a high school newspaper and the art of editing is DEADER than chivalry.  Case in point:

“Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration (NCA) has bested the nation’s top corporations and other federal agencies in a prestigious, independent survey of customer satisfaction.”

Surely, it can’t just be my snarky old grouchy self asking if they are so ahead because the dead have no way to fill out complaint forms, can it?  No, I didn’t read the entire article — the link wouldn’t work.

Filed under: Media Morons, Snark

Recently, an unusually personal and lengthy exchange in the New York Times has raised the question: Did Woody Allen molest Dylan Farrow when Dylan was a child?

I have no idea.

But millions of people have an opinion, many of them quite strong. Across the blogosphere, comments about the subject have been loud, and dominated by three views.

One group—including many survivors of such victimization—believes children never lie about this, and accuses American society of not wanting to hear about its enormous rate of sexual exploitation. Another group—including many people with a very different experience—notes that in bitter child custody battles adults will do and say practically anything, including accusations of abuse, and coaching kids to hate or fear. A third group examines the “he said, she said” facts and allegations, and comes to its own conclusions—giving itself permission to have an opinion despite having no actual knowledge about the alleged event.

America’s attitudes about childhood sexual exploitation are deeply troubling. The troubling attitudes start with ignorance—of the structure of human memory, of the incidence of false accusations, of distinctions between kinds of exploitation. It continues with indignation and moralism, claiming that objective attempts to understand and parse this phenomenon ultimately disrespect all victims, and at worse, hide a tolerance of molestation.

It climaxes with pop psychology and sloppy journalism which claims that “1 out of 3 females is molested in her lifetime,” lumping together physical coercion, psychological pressure, bullying, bad parenting, and shame induction, so that the category “child molestation” loses its value to describe or explain much of anything—thus trivializing the horrific crime the term is meant to define.

Many general facts about child sexual exploitation are known:
• Many children are sexually exploited
• Many children who complain about molestation go unbelieved
• Many abusers go unpunished
• Many accusations of child molestation are false
• The most common situation in which false accusations occur is a divorce—and tragically, the children are often coached by one parent to accuse the other. Some children are coached by investigators—sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently through unprofessional techniques.

Many activists, policymakers, and the public seem unaware that, proven beyond any doubt, the structure of human memory does NOT resemble videotape—recording everything accurately, and playing back everything accurately under the right circumstances.

If anything, human memory is more like a digital photo that is constantly being photoshopped—by exposure to others’ memories, others’ opinions, cultural norms, and subsequent events that seem to contradict or confirm the memory. It’s surprisingly common for people to believe that certain things happened to them that actually didn’t. And it’s surprisingly easy to implant false memories in both children and adults. For more on this, see the work and Ted talk of world-renowned scientist Elizabeth Loftus.

Too many of the comments about the Allen-Farrow situation say that Ms. Farrow should be believed because (1) the millions of victims out there are damaged when any molest accuser is disbelieved and (2) not believing an accuser discourages victims from coming forward in the future.

This logic transforms the Allen-Farrow situation involving two actual people—about whom we know nothing—into social forces, about which we all have opinions and desire particular outcomes. It’s a call for retributive “justice” similar to the calls to convict Rodney King’s tormentors and to acquit OJ Simpson because African-Americans have historically been mistreated by Caucasian police.

And too many of the comments about the Allen-Farrow situation come down to “If you doubt that she’s telling the truth, you obviously hate women, tolerate rape, are blinded by male privilege, and/or are a molester yourself.”

Consider the crime of murder: most people agree that professionals can study it, differentiate among different types of it, know that some people are falsely accused of it, and study how that happens. Yet no one discussing these points is accused of not taking murder seriously, or not believing that it happens.

We should be at least that smart about child sexual exploitation. Intelligent people not involved in a situation should be willing to say “I don’t know what actually happened”—without having their integrity or compassion questioned.

And if an intelligent person is unsure whether something heinous happened in a particular situation, s/he shouldn’t have to hastily add that “of course, these heinous things do happen way too often, and of course I’m totally against them.”

When those are the ground rules—that doubting that X was molested or harassed or raped is a legitimate (although possibly incorrect) viewpoint—then we can have an actual, serious conversation about this serious subject.

Fantasies are great. They’re hot and fun and what drew many of us into kink in the first place. But they’re not reality. Clinging to a fantasy in the face of real life evidence to the contrary requires ignoring that evidence. Lack of evidence makes it just a little bit difficult to figure out what’s going wrong, let alone how to fix it.

For example, years ago on fetlife in the submissive men and the women who love them group, a man started a thread asking for guidance on being the best submissive he could be. All well and good, but he posted in all caps and replaced ‘E’s with ’3′s. Person after person replied asking him to post in a more readable format, but he insisted they were all out to deny his self expression and eventually left in a huff because no one would tell him how to be a better submissive. I sincerely wish I was exaggerating, but he was actually that deluded.

This guy was clearly living in a fantasy land, and it worked out badly for him. If he had been willing to put aside his fantasy that he was such a special and unique snowflake that everyone would rush to do him favours no matter how poorly he expressed himself, he might have been able to learn something.

As annoying as that particular person was, he really only hurt himself. None of the people he so thoroughly alienated were actually harmed by trying to read a few badly formatted posts. Other types of fantasies, however, can be much more harmful.

There are three main categories of fantasies I see in the scene. ‘It would be hot if…’, ‘It would be convenient for me if…’, and ‘My kink would be okay if…’.

‘It would be hot if…’ fantasies are the all too common ‘this protocol turns my crank, so I’m going to use it everywhere, even if S/slashy speak on a simple message board makes people want to claw their eyes out’, or ‘all the female doms in porn like verbal humiliation, so you should you like it too’. If you willfully ignore other people’s complaints about how hard your posts are to read, you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering why you can’t seem to make friends with anyone. If no-one you approach will give you the time of day, there may be a reason for it.

‘It would be convenient for me if…’ is that much more irritating. I put ‘I declared myself dominant, so you must all bow down and address me as Sir Lord Emperor Black Dragon Wolf’ in that category. It would be great if simply calling yourself a dom/top/master made you effortlessly confident in all situations – believe me, I wish it had worked that way for me. I think ‘my way is the one true way and the rest of you are all wrong’ belongs in this category too. It would be awfully convenient if there were one true way to do things that was clearly best for everyone. If there were, we could all stop screwing around and just do the stuff that works. In the real world, insisting there is one right way causes people to laugh at you either behind your back or right to your face. It’s also a bit of a setback when you inevitably encounter a situation where your ‘one true way’ doesn’t work.

‘My kink would be okay if…’ fantasies probably irritate me the most, although all of them are abundantly annoying. This is where I place fantasies like ‘all women are naturally submissive, so it’s okay for me to be dominant’, and ‘I follow the ancient Japanese tradition of rope masters, handed down generation by generation in a secret ceremony, so it’s okay for me to like tying people up’. It’s okay to be kinky, dammit! A lack of permanent damage and your partner’s informed consent makes your kink okay.

What’s not okay is hurting other people while you try to convince yourself your kink is okay. I don’t feel safe in a scene where asshats can go around insisting that women are all naturally submissive without anyone calling them on their shit. Your need to put a band-aid on your insecurity about your kink does not outrank my need to be able to participate in the kink community without getting attacked just for being who I am.

Feeling insecure about whether it’s okay to be kinky is perfectly natural, and not what I’m complaining about. What I can’t stand is people deciding that because they feel insecure, everyone should act in a way that lets them avoid dealing with their insecurities. The scene is based on consent, and I do not consent to denying who I am so that you don’t have to worry about whether you’re ‘doing it right’.

As I have written before, I am currently being sued by an ex-boyfriend, George Owen Horatio Morris, aka Owen Morris, for defamation in Scotland (this is the terminology in Scottish courts covering what English courts would call 'libel' and 'slander'). The case is scheduled to come to trial in June 2015. This is a summary of the claims being made by both sides, and my comment on why I believe this case could have a significant negative impact on freedom of speech.

The case and arguments
(aka the long and boring bit)

The claims relate not only to the two Times articles Mr Morris contested in English courts in Morris v Times, but also to the content of my blog and books dating back to 2003. At the time this comes to trial my blog will be over 12 years old and my first book over 10 years old. Neither I nor Mr Morris lived in Scotland at the time the books were written. He moved to Morayshire in 2008; I moved to west Lochaber in 2010. (For those not familiar with Scottish geography, it's about 125 miles between them - longer then the distance from London to Birmingham.)

For reasons I do not entirely understand - I hope you'll bear with me, legalese is not my native tongue - the time bar has not come into effect on this case. My suspicion (and perhaps regret) is that I should have been firmer on this from the beginning and insisted on it, though I'm not sure it would have affected Mr Morris's subsequent behaviour or prevented the case from going on.

The content objected to is, as in the English Times case, that I implicated Mr Morris indirectly as the cause of the Mail on Sunday trying to out me. While I did not ever name or describe Mr Morris, his job, location, or appearance anywhere, his case presumes that my outing myself to defend against unfair tabloid journalism that I anticipated form the MoS was a de facto outing of him.

My claim, by contrast, is that I repeatedly declined to identify him to the press, and that his interviews with the MoS are the cause of his "outing", especially the real first name and photos he provided to them. A notice of the Morris v Times case in the Press Gazette was the first time his first and last names appeared in association with mine. I believe if anyone is responsible for his outing, it is Morris himself.

I also still believe he was the initial instigator of the MoS's identification of me, as I have seen no evidence of another source. What I have seen a number of emails Morris exchanged with Laura Topham at the MoS before I became aware of her investigation. (In one for instance he writes, "I will sell myself but not too cheaply." We disagree over what he meant by that.)

Mr Morris is also disputing some of the content of the books. He claims that I was not a sex worker; I have addressed that at length here, with relevant photos including the Archive.org impression of my original escorting ad. Maggie McNeill has obtained Mr Morris's own 2004 diary, in which he states several times that he knew I was a sex worker, details of my clients that he uncovered, etc. In a 2009 interview he confirms he did know I was an escort; his story had changed a lot by 2013.

Mr Morris claims there is no income or tax evidence that I was a sex worker. As it happens I was investigated by the HMRC in 2010-2012, and provided them with my full bank records showing the income, and tax returns showing the tax paid. After a thorough investigation of my complete financial affairs from 1999-2012 they agreed both that the declarations of escort income were truthful and that I had paid appropriate (in fact, too much) tax. There are also contemporary notebooks in which I recorded some appointment details. These will all be entered into evidence.

Mr Morris claims some of what I wrote about our sex life is defamatory. Specifically in the first book, I relate that he attempted (consensually) to fist me but was unable to. I maintain that this is truthful and also not defamatory.

Mr Morris claims some of the people I wrote about as clients or other partners are really him. I will counter this with the identities of my other partners at the trial and evidence that I was open about not being monogamous. As yet there are no plans to name any clients, though it may become necessary to do so.

Mr Morris claims we were in a committed, exclusive relationship and indeed engaged; I claim it was no such thing (no cohabitation, no shared assets, no wedding plans, no announcement, no ring). In addition if as he states we had been engaged, I would have had to apply for a change to my visa and for permission to marry in the UK (this was a requirement later abolished in 2011) and name him as a referee to the Border Agency in those changes, which I never did.

Mr Morris claims to have lost his job as an RAF officer because of my past. I maintain that his short-term commission came to an end in November 2011, as it was always meant to do, as seen in the announcement of his commission.

Mr Morris says that in spite of public threats he published on his blog, that it was a "quixotic threat" and that no person would have taken it seriously. I disagree. I should add Mr Morris stands 6 feet tall, was a boxer, and as he tells anyone who meets him, is "sixteen stone" and "strong as an ox". He has on occasion been hospitalised for injuries sustained in street fights.

My feeling is that I had reasonable cause to believe he was about to attack me and my husband and that he later changed the wording on his blog to sound less threatening. There are screencaps to show this, as well as a Defence Vetting Agency report from 2010 in which Mr Morris agrees making the threat was wrong. I went to the police about his threats in 2009 and they retained copies of some of the letters he wrote to me after I asked him to cease contact.

Mr Morris claims that my past as a sex worker means he is no longer accepted by 'right thinking people'. I hold that my past has had no negative influence on how me and my husband get on in our private lives, that we are both active and valued members of our community, so by extension it can not possibly be an impediment to his free association or employability. Mr Morris lives with a partner whom he met after November 2009, so I do not understand his claim to not be able to associate with 'right thinking people'.

In addition I will be confirming my statements that Mr Morris was controlling and abusive throughout our relationship. To this end there will be witnesses to him trying to attack me at home in London in 2004, the aforementioned letters and police report, the aforementioned diary of Mr Morris's, phone records of me calling domestic violence hotlines, other people he had interactions with as witnesses, etc.

In an interview in the Times, I said, "My ex wanted his payday. It is what it is." He claims he did not sell me out. I believe he did and have seen nothing credible to indicate otherwise.

There is another Times interview in which it was reported that I sought a restraining order against Mr Morris. I will provide the email exchange showing I did not claim this and it was, as the Times averred in their settlement with him, an error entirely originating with them. That said, I should have got a restraining order. I didn't pursue the option because at the time I desperately hoped if I ignored him he might finally leave me alone.

The money part

Mr Morris is claiming damages of £700,000. (This is over 3 times greater than the largest ever defamation settlement awarded in Scotland, to Tommy Sheridan against News of the World. As many will recall that judgment was swiftly followed by a criminal trial in which Mr Sheridan was found guilty of perjury during the proceedings.)

Everyone knows defamation actions rarely go to court and are ruinously expensive if they do. While I was not keen to settle with Mr Morris, my solicitors did ask what he would settle for. They were told "no less than six figures." If you settle, you pay all legal costs on top. This puts me in a position where, being unable to meet such a large settlement and his legal costs and mine, I have no choice but to go to court and hope the judge sees the truth.

It is a matter of public record what has been earned by Bizrealm Ltd, the company that holds the copyright to my books. So it is difficult to imagine why he is after an amount I clearly would not be able to meet. All of the assets I have are currently being used to settle the ongoing and enormous legal bills that defending this action requires, and I am among the luckier defendants in such cases, to be even able to do that much. At the end of the trial - win or lose - I likely will have nothing left. That much is obvious and without debate. What that indicates as regards Mr Morris's real motivation is, of course, for you to speculate.

The caveats

I was a terrible girlfriend for sure! Anyone who has read my books can see that. I was not ready to commit to anyone at that time, certainly not to Mr Morris, whom I did not trust. I openly dated other people and carried on other relationships at the same time. I neither hid this from Mr Morris nor misled him about it.

I should have ended the relationship long before I did. I didn't because I believed he would go to the press, a desire detailed in his 2004 diary and repeated to me many times afterwards, and that he would physically harm me. On some level as well I had convinced myself I was worth no better than how he treated me.

I continue to defend my choice of sex work and the rights of sex workers more generally. I neither seek nor want "redemption" for my choices and take full responsibility for them. I know people have problems with my decisions, but they worked out for me, and I did not break the law.

On paper Mr Morris looks like a much "better" person than me. Public school, ex-officer, and so forth. Me, I'm a migrant and ex-sex worker. If it was really "she said/he said"… but it's not. I have saved a surprising amount of things from that failed and hurtful relationship that prove my arguments.

So far, so gossip. And plenty of people who already disliked me have taken the opportunity to use this to twist the knife a bit more. They are so desperate to cling to their decade-old mantra of "she does not exist" that they'll promote the word of an abuser over hard evidence. I suppose as consolation, their snipes and hate is small beer compared to what Mr Morris has done to my life, consistently, aggressively, for the last decade and the effect his persistent harassment has had on my and my family's safety, and on my health.

The wider implications

At the moment this is still only my (very large, expensive) hill of beans to climb. My fear is that the continuation of this action sends a message to the sort of people with significant interest in silencing writers. It's an open door for other bullies and thugs.

What would this mean for defamation law more generally? While reforms have been achieved in some areas of defamation law in England and Wales, as Alastair Bonnington notes it is clear that Scotland has a long way yet to go. Considering the shared media that the UK currently has, I am surprised there has not been more momentum get the law changed up here.

What it means for writers is this - if you write about someone and they subsequently move to Scotland, they can sue you for defamation, even if you never name them. Even if you never set foot in Scotland. This creates a significant chilling effect where writers anywhere in the world could be at risk of nuisance lawsuits years after their works were published. Memoirists, bloggers, scientists, journalists: beware. Don't trick yourself into thinking that it couldn't happen to you.

This action creates an atmosphere for what's known as "libel tourism". While any future changes to the law would not affect my case, I hope this will spur people into action. The defamation laws in Scotland are a significant risk to freedom of speech worldwide.

Can this help anyone else? For the sake of sanity, I hope so, I hope so.

The more parents who opt out of making their children go through the pointless and educationally destructive Common Core standardized testing that is the fad of Rheeist politicians of both parties, the better. I certainly implore all the parents who read this blog to stand up against this horrible education policy that hurts both students and teachers.

Last night, Oklahoma State’s star basketball player Marcus Smart went into the stands and shoved a Texas Tech fan. The initial reaction was typical–Smart’s a bad apple, he’s blowing his career being stupid, etc. See Myron Medcalf who claims, “It’s too early to know exactly what happened with Smart and that fan.” So let’s be sure to write that blog post condemning him before we know what happened!

Because you see, it’s typically much more complicated. Dave Zirin with a great run down here. Turns out this “fan” is a notorious jerk, so much so that Dick Vitale knows who he is and viscerally dislikes him. And he’s a racist. In fact, Smart claims this dude called him the n-word, which the guy is only sort of denying. But there’s larger issues at play here. Zirin:

5 – I have over the years spoken to a ton of former college basketball players who have stories about having racial slurs tossed at them by fans. They are conditioned before games to never go into the stands, and just keep their anger in check, no matter the cost to their mental and physical health. They are also pressured not speak about it to the media after games, to keep up the illusion of college athletics as some kind of innocent, wholesome endeavor. This dynamic, as much as anything, speaks to the utter powerlessness of so-called student athletes.

6 – Moments like this are exactly why the Northwestern football players felt compelled to form a union. So-called “student-athletes” have no power. They have no grievance procedure. Right now, as we speak, Marcus Smart is being told that the best thing for him, his family and his future NBA draft status, would be to just apologize and take whatever slap-on-the-wrist the Big 12 or the NCAA hands down. The most upsetting part, given the economics at play, is that this is probably good advice. It might not be great counsel for Smart’s mental health, but it is for his wallet.

7 – In a just world, Marcus Smart would not be suspended at all. Instead the NCAA would enact a FIFA style response. That means they would either bar Jeff Orr for life from ever going to another Texas Tech game, or, if it is found out that “the n-word” gets dropped from the stands in Lubbock like it’s open-season on black players, then make Texas Tech play in front of an empty arena for the rest of the season.

8 – A lot of former players are saying the equivalent of former NFL player Donte Stallworth who tweeted, “You don’t get a free pass to say/do whatever you want to athletes because you’re a fan… just save that faux tough guy ish for the internet. If you talk about a players family, fire a racial slur or throw a drink on them, right or wrong, you shouldn’t be surprised at retaliation.” Players are tired of enduring this, and they should not have to.

9 – One person tweeted to me that Jackie Robinson would never have gone into the stands when called a racial slur. This “Jackie Robinson: model minority” nonsense needs to be unpacked. First of all, that was 1947. Times have changed. Second, Jackie Robinson, a husband and a father, would have risked organized violence, as in lynch mobs, if he had pursed a physical response against fans. Third, Jackie Robinson was a 26-year-old Army veteran and a college graduate from UCLA. He also carried the hopes and dreams of masses of people with every at-bat. To ask a 19-year-old Marcus Smart to act in accordance with Jackie Robinson is a ridiculous weight to ask Mr. Smart to carry. And lastly Jackie Robinson, if you read his searing memoir, I Never Had It Made, had real regrets about not going into the stands and pummeling racists with what he called “my despised black fists”. Jackie Robinson died way too young at age 53. He and his family always believed that his early death was connected to the stress that he had to carry precisely because he kept it all bottled in on direct orders from the Brooklyn Dodgers organization and on society’s orders, shaped by the pre-civil rights times in which he played.

I do hate how conservatives (or anti-people standing up for themselves) have turned Jackie Robinson into whatever they want him to be, i.e. “a model for the race” which in reality means someone who never says a public word against the racism they face from fans. As Zirin says, it’s not 1947 and there needs to be a real way to deal with this. The NCAA doesn’t care, Texas Tech certainly doesn’t care, the players have absolutely no power to do anything. They are unpaid labor serving as a free minor league to professional sports leagues, often at significant cost to taxpayers and students. Marcus Smart could quit right now, go play in Europe for a few months with compensation, and then go declare for the draft. But then he’d been seen as even more of a bad apple. Instead, wherever he plays next on the road, opposing fans can use whatever racial epithets they want and there’s really nothing anyone is going to do about it.

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